JACK COWAN: Don't be fooled, those fetching flowers are going to let you down

SAN ANGELO, Texas - There is something wrong with me. I don’t like wildflowers.

Well, that’s putting it too strongly. I don’t dislike them, I just resent them. And while I occasionally put on rose-colored glasses to sneak a peek at them, I’m not going to drive to see them, not to an obscure dirt road in Mason County, not even to the other side of town.

I could say it’s because I don’t want to spend half my free weekend time on a nature scavenger hunt through the Hill Country, but that would be only partially true. I just don’t find them interesting enough to go to the trouble of finding them. Bring them to me and I’ll probably say, “That’s nice,” because that’s about as enthused as I can get over flowers.

Like I said, there’s something wrong with me.

I know this because our plugged-in columnist Rick Smith has been giving a blow-by-blow account of the flowering flowers, and many of our readers have been gobbling — or smelling, or ogling — it all up. They gas up their vehicles and whoosh out to roads they never knew existed, their cameras clicking up little whirring storms to record what they hope will be regarded as the best wildflower patch ever captured for posterity.

Happily for them, this is the year that might happen. We’ve had all this ridiculous amount of rain, which apparently encourages wildflowers to flaunt themselves garishly like peacocks on steroids. Some say this is the best year ever for hustling to the hinterlands to fuss over the fetching flora.

I envy the people who rejoice at seeing wildflowers. While nature agnostics like me go from November through March stumbling through the gloomy, gray, drab winter wondering if this is the year everything stays that way permanently, the positive-thinking members of the bluebonnet brigade are straining to control the bliss they know is coming.

They know that soon the thermometer will begin sneaking up and — abracadabra — fields will burst with buttercups and percolate with paintbrushes. They are comforted by memories of past springs when they broke free from the surly bonds of winter and fled to the Hill Country to drink in the oceans of nature’s brilliant colors. They never doubted the day would come. They are the true bluebonnet believers.

I blame it on Lady Bird Johnson, who seemed a perfectly grand lady until she went all Johnny Appleseed on us and arranged for the flinging of future flowers over every spare speck of Central Texas soil. Next thing you knew, that rugged, tough, character-building landscape had turned all scenic and sissified.

Didn’t she have a sense of history? Didn’t she know that God intended for us to have to search hard for subtle beauty there, usually for years before we found some appreciation of that place, and not to have armies of boastful flowers waving their petals to be admired by us?

Clearly she didn’t, so for another week or two or three tens of thousands of folks will go roaming previously forgotten areas, hoping to find psychedelic prairies to lift them into Texnirvana. For people like me, the trip would come close to being worth it only if we made it to Fredericksburg for German food or Llano for barbecue or wandered through Luckenbach for a brew.

I wish those searchers the best of luck. I hope they find wildflowers at their delirious heights and that this year’s crop is the most spectacular ever, coupled with experts’ projections that next year’s will be even better. Obviously they are nature junkies, and they should get their wildflower fix.

But I speak for the silent sufferers, the people who understand and accept that the gloomy gray has only briefly flickered to green and grand before the miserable heat arrives and the flowers shrivel and the normal, God-given ugly brown shrouds the countryside.

We’re not anti-pretty flower. We’re just realists. We know that pretty flowers are floozies seeking to lead us down the wrong Hill Country roads before nature shows us its true colors.